The GOP Can Eclipse Obama on Transparency

During his first two years in office, the president generated a lot of heat in the transparency area — but little sunlight. House Republicans can quickly outshine Obama and the Democratic Senate. It all depends on how they implement the watch phrase of their amendment package: “publicly available in electronic form.”
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The House can reach the gold standard for transparency if its new practices make introducing a bill and publishing the bill online the same thing. Moving a bill out of committee and posting the committee-passed version as online data must also be the same thing. Voting on a bill and publishing all data about the vote online must be standard procedure.
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The transparency community owes it to Congress to say how it wants to get the data.

Of course, I’ve fooled you just a little bit. The whole thing is a highlight! (ahem) Read it.

Jim Harper / Jim is the Director of Information Policy Studies at The Cato Institute, the Editor of Web-based privacy think-tank Privacilla.org, and the Webmaster of WashingtonWatch.com. Prior to becoming a policy analyst, Jim served as counsel to committees in both the House and Senate.